Author: Barrett Golding/Archives

Are You Happy?

Poster art by H34DUP and Budget Fabulous Films, posted at TypCut:

More on Are You Happy?‘s info flow.

via HG.

Great Failure

“People always ask, ‘What is your greatest failure?’ I always have the same answer: ‘We’re working on it right now, it’s gonna be awesome!'”
—Product designer Jim Coudal (Coudal Partners), interviewed by Design Glut.

via Tin Bonham’s twits.

5770 Years New

The New Year starts tonight at sunset — Jewish days begin at sundown. Welcome to 5770, the first day of Tishri: Rosh Hashanah. So knock off work, sound the shofar, shuffle off to shul, and wish all: L’shanah tovah (“for a good year”; candle lighting times for your area).

Rosh Hashanah is “the day of judgment” (Yom ha-Din) and “the day of remembrance” (Yom ha-Zikkaron). And, ‘course, according to Kabbalah, the year 5770 will affect the rectification of the Sefirot of Keter of Hod of Hod of Yesod — but you know that, right?

So get ready, folks, cuz in 10 days we got us a Yom Kippur coming, the Day of Atonement, and the big guy’s gonna do some writin’ in the book, signed, “sealed”, delivered.

y’hi ratzon mil’fanekha Adonai eloheinu vei’lohei avoteinu
May it be Your will, Lord our God and God of our ancestors
 

sh’t’chadeish aleinu shanah tovah um’tukah.
that you renew for us a good and sweet year.

President Obama: Warm Wishes for Rosh Hashana

And some equal-time for our fellow Semitic friends:

President Obama: Ramadan Message

Water and Air

From the Science Photo Library:

Global water and air volume: Conceptual computer artwork of the total volume of water on Earth (left) and of air in the Earth’s atmosphere (right) shown as spheres (blue and pink). The spheres show how finite water and air supplies are. The water sphere measures 1390 kilometres across and has a volume of 1.4 billion cubic kilometres. This includes all the water in the oceans, seas, ice caps, lakes and rivers as well as ground water, and that in the atmosphere. The air sphere measures 1999 kilometres across and weighs 5140 trillion tonnes. As the atmosphere extends from Earth it becomes less dense. Half of the air lies within the first 5 kilometres of the atmosphere. Image by Dr Adam Nieman.

via TED Talk by Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action.

Didya Know

On our new Didya Know page, we’re breaking down the stats & sources from the popular fact-filled “Did You Know” videos, along w/ updates and errata — lotsa the latter. In fact we’ve found so many errors, the page has become less “Did You Know?” and more “how do we figure out what we know?”

Here’s a YouTube playlist with two versions of “Did you Know?” and two parodies:

See HV’s “Didya Know” Statements, Sources, Updates, and Errata.

Die, Sweet Roadrunner

Be careful what you wish for— From Seth MacFarlane’s (Family Guy creator) Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, “Die, Sweet Roadrunner, Die:”

Camel Jockey

“Glenda Sutton is a camel jockey.” She trains, rides and races the critters. Photographer Tim Bonham is mixing a radio story for us on Glenda, based on his superb photo-audio slideshow, “The Boulia Camel Races,” in his multimedia collection.

According to some estimates there are upwards of a million feral camels roaming the Australian outback. Some end up as meat, some are culled in a seemingly futile attempt to keep their numbers down, some ruin sacred aboriginal watering holes by drowning in them. A select few end up in the outback town of Boulia, Queensland to run in the most important camel race in Australia. Glenda Sutton is a camel jockey and talked to me about the nature of camels and what it’s like to hurtle down the racecourse on the back of one.
—Tim Bonham

Moments

Sez Radio Lab: “After hearing our about moments of death, filmmaker Will Hoffman went out in search of moments of life. What follows is what he found:

16: Moments

Cage Silence

Listen : John Cage – in love with sound / silence -01

Transcript of the interview with John Cage in the film “Ecoute” (Listen) by Miroslav Sebestik:

[part 1]
When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking, and talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic, here on 6th avenue for instance, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound. What it does is it gets louder and quieter, and it gets higher and lower, and it gets longer and shorter. It does all those things.

I am completely satisfied with that. I don’t need sound to talk to me. We don’t see much difference between time and space. We don’t know where one begins and the other stops. So that most of the arts we think of as being in time, and most of the arts we think of being in space. More…

Iverson Innovation

Painter Jerry Inverson (an HV fren) received a Montana Arts Council Artist’s Innovation Award. In artspeak: “He uses traditional materials, including sumi ink, layers of very thin paper, and rabbit skin glue to create black and white abstract canvases that are influenced by Asian calligraphy, yet outside the structure of language.”

Check his sheep-shearing series in HV art/audio “Counting Sheep” webwork. Jerry is represented by the Pulliam Gallery, Portland OR.

Jew Causes AIDS

TechCrunch reports:

healthBase is a semantic search engine that aggregates medical content from millions of authoritative health sites… [with] some major glitches (see the comments). One of the most unfortunate examples is when you type in a search for “AIDS,” one of the listed causes of the disease is “Jew.” Really.

The ridiculousness continues. When you click on Jew, you can see proper “Treatments” for Jews, “Drugs And Medications” for Jews and “Complications” for Jews. Apparently, “alcohol” and “coarse salt” are treatments to get rid of Jews, as is Dr. Pepper! Who knew?

[So] is it a semantic engine or an anti-semitic search engine?
—TechCrunch “NetBase Thinks You Can Get Rid Of Jews With Alcohol And Salt “

Portable Recorder Comparisons

The amazing, authoritative, and all-around hombre bueno, Jeff Towne, has compiled Portable Digital Recorder Comparison charts over at Transom Tools. He’s also writ revus of the new Tascam DR-Series Flash Recorders.

HV070- Shortcuts Thru 1969

Hearing Voices from NPR®
070 Shortcuts Thru 1969: From the Moon to Woodstock
Host: Peter Bochan of WBAI-FM
Airs week of: 2009-09-09

“Shortcuts Thru 1969 ” (52:00 mp3):

1969, the year in an hour, another in the Shortcuts series by Peter Bochan of All Mixed Up:

From Woodstock to Altamont, Washington to Vietnam, Chappaquidick to Chicago with stops at Stonewall, Hyde Park, Shea Stadium, The Super Bowl, Memphis, Times Square, Sesame Street, and the Moon. Featuring commentary from John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Iggy Pop, the Smothers Brothers, Richard Pryor, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Roman Polanski, Richard Nixon, JFK, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Walter Cronkite, Ted Kennedy, Burgess Meredith, Donald Sutherland, Elliot Gould, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Lang, “Topaz Caucasion”, Chip Monck, Dave Marsh, Joe Boyd, Rob Kirkpatrick, Carl Capotorto, Arlo Guthrie, Hugh Romney, Harry Reasoner, Nile Rogers, various FBI and police agents, The Black Panthers, The Weather Underground, The Zodiac Killer, Apollo 11 astronauts and many others.

Music from Hair, Midnight Cowboy, Sly and the Family Stone, The 5th Dimension, Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, James Brown, David Bowie, The Who, Les McCann & Eddie Harris, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Blind Faith, Roy Budd, The Plastic Ono Band, The Jefferson Airplane, Arlo Guthrie, Canned Heat, The Beach Boys, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joni Mitchell, Beautiful People, Jimi Hendrix, Procol Harum, Henry Mancini and The Stooges! More…

Beer Medal Map

My bike-tourin’ partner, Josef, suggests we use this map to plot our next trip…

2009 Great American Beer Festival Medal Map
Infographics by Mike Wirth (detail, click for: monster 1M map):

Tech Support Cheat Sheet

xkcd has give away all our ‘puter fixin’ secrets; now people won’t think we’re geniuses anymore…

xkcd: Tech Support Cheat Sheet

via Cow Words.

Andrei’s Internet

AndreiC interweaves two simultaneous timelines, his and the intertubes, in this Internet History As Tracked By Codrescu : NPR (3:34 mp3 ):

On July 20, 1969, I mourned the last virgin moon, before man landed on it, with some hippies on a beach in Southern California. On Sept. 2, 1969, two computers exchanged meaningless data in the first test of Arpanet, an experimental military network. [transcript]

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Oddio Art

Our “Oddio Art” automated hyperactive audio-art generator features Martin Luther King Jr, Maya Angelou, and Ted Kennedy, with music by Joe Bass and Flash-yness from Eli 5 Stone.

Paleontologists TMBG

My hometown houses the Museum of the Rockies with “one of the finest paleontology collections in North America.” Several dinosaur diggers are frens of mine.

So was happy to hear their career glorified on They Might Be Giants new double kids CD/DVD Here Comes Science. The song is “I Am a Paleontologist (with Danny Weinkauf)” (2:32 mp3):

Another TMBG sci-song: “Electric Car”
They Might Be Giants (vocals: Robin Goldwasser)

via Some Velvet Blog.

BG on iTunes

PRX is getting into the digital record-label biz, and their first release on iTunes is by yours truly. The album is called Fragments, the artist is The Wandering Jew, aka, Barrett Golding, aka, me, aka, go buy it fer chrissakes (make that yahweh’s sake).

Ted Kennedy 1932-2009

Senator from Massachusetts Edward Moore “Ted” Kennedy (February 22, 1932 – August 25, 2009). Here’s his eulogy for his brother Bobby, delivered 8 June 1968 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York; “Address at the Public Memorial Service for Robert F. Kennedy” (9:42 mp3 | transcript):

My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.

As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: “Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.”

HV used an excerpt from above in our Oddio Art interactive toy, and in our survey of 1968.